"For customer selection and segments is of course, in the beginning, you're just trying to figure out who your segments are, right? So you have some mish-mash of customers, but if you don't deliberately try to understand if one is a good customer or bad customer and you don't fire your bad customers, you get confused. You continue adding customers, but you might be losing money on some of these customers. They might be giving you roadmap items that are not relevant to your good customers. You need to realize that sooner. Operational discipline is important and that's something that I was reflecting on. I think about how I could push people to do that faster so they won’t hang around the hoop with bad customer selection." - Shiyan Koh
"It's about the timing of the investment. You invest because you're going to reap this benefit later. And for a while, when the fundraising was easy later, it just seemed really far away. You didn't have to show that you were getting operating leverage on a business. And now, as things have slowed down and later is now, you need to show results now. That's an interesting psychological trick that people play on themselves where eventually, businesses need to make money. When I looked at some businesses in our portfolio that went sideways, they weren't bad businesses, but they ran out of time. Even though they had transformed their businesses within 12 months, it wasn't enough. It made me ask the question, if they had done it 12 months earlier, could they have made it? For a company starting today, they have a more realistic picture of how much time they have to show that they can do it. No one's going to give me multiple rounds and pots of money to keep setting on fire." - Shiyan Koh
"There are a number of times that I told people that we should look sooner at monetization. You get a mixed reception to that because the founder is getting a lot of really positive feedback in the market from their top-line growth or their fundraising. And then, you're like this other voice saying that maybe we should look at this thing. They might think that you don't believe in their vision or that that’s for later because they’ll do something else first. So, it really depends on how good your relationship is with that founder, but also the cacophony of other data that they're receiving from the market about whether they're on the right track or not, and in the boom time of fundraising, you feel super validated when people are throwing money at you." - Shiyan Koh
In this episode, Jeremy Au speaks on the 2024 regional tech forecast, 2023 bear market reflections, and podcast hosting gratitude with Shiyan Koh.
Keywords: 2024 Regional Tech Forecast, 2023 Bear Market Reflections, Podcast Hosting Gratitude, Shiyan Koh, Southeast Asia, Thought Leadership
